The Best American Poetry

Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner (I)

"A National Anthem?" (by Laura Orem)

                                        

I grew up near Baltimore, so field trips to Fort McHenry were obligatory in elementary school. We learned the lyrics (first verse, anyway) to "The Star-Spangled Banner" in kindergarten, and posters of Francis Scott Key always had pride of place on Social Studies' bulletin boards about Famous Americans. Getting in and out of Baltimore from the south requires either a trip over the Francis Scott Key Bridge, an elegant arch that marks where the Patapsco River empties into the Chesapeake Bay, or through the Francis Scott Key Tunnel, a not-so-elegant concrete passageway under the mucky waters of Baltimore Harbor.

However, I've never been too fond of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as a song. Famously, Key, a lawyer, wrote the words after watching the Battle of Baltimore while imprisoned on a British warship during the War of 1812. The poem, called "Defence of Fort McHenry,"  was published in September of 1814 as a broadside by Judge Joseph H. Nicholson, who was Key's brother-in-law (connections are everything). Nicholson realized that the words fit the melody of "To Anacreon, in Heav'n," the official song of a group of amateur musicans who performed in the 1760s and who used the song to gauge the sobriety of the singer: if you were sober enough to stay on key through one verse, you could keep drinking. As a song, "Anacreon" leaves a lot to be desired. Melodically, it's appallingly difficult to sing; it's unbelievably long; and its chorus consists of many variations of the four lines: "And long may the Sons/Of Anacreon entwine/The Myrtle of Venus/With Bacchus' vine."  But when the poem was republished later that month in the Baltimore Patriot and the American with the notation, "Tune: To Anacreon," the two were permanently connected.

 

                                                 

  FSK peering through the rockets' red glare

What I find particularly problematic, though, is that Key's words are so bloody pugnacious.

Movie Moments - Richard III (1996)

This might be my favorite "movie moment" of all.  It combines great singing by the singular Stacey Kent, jaunty music, and snappy lyrics by none other than, well, you tell us.  (FYI, the singing begins about 2 minutes in.) Be sure to listen to the very end before you supply your answer.   This version of Shakespeare's Richard III has been moved from England of the 1480s to England of the 1930s, a country about to be overrun by fascists. (Given the non-aggression pact the English entered into with Hitler in the '30s, this setting is not all that far-fetched.) It stars Ian McKellan, who co-wrote the adaptation with director Richard Loncraine. 

-- sdh

"'History, history! We fools, what do we know or care?'" (quote by WCW, post by Laura Orem)

"You must always know the past, for there is no real Was, there is only Is." - William Faulkner

"If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable Man must be of learning from experience." - George Bernard Shaw

"[History] is just one damned thing after another." - Arthur Toynbee

One of the classes I teach at Goucher College is "Art as Activism." We look at the role art plays in social and political commentary, within its particular historical context, starting with the 1930s and moving right up to the present. The final assignment has the students creating their own work of art about a contemporary issue that matters to them and writing a combination research paper/artist statement about the project. It's a lot of fun, both for the students and for me.

Of course, we see lots of issues coming up again and again over the eighty or so years we study. Right now, there's a lot of talk swirling around about the state of the economy, how current events eerily echo the Crash of 1929. I've joked that I'm going to have my students throw away their textbook on the Great Depression and subscribe to the New York Times instead. There is a sad truth in the cliche about history repeating itself. Or rather, Faulkner seems to have it best -- history is an unbroken continuation of human experience, not a collection of isolated incidents that richocet back to us again and again like a lopsided superball.

One of the artists we study is Woody Guthrie. My students often only know of him from singing, "This Land is Your Land" in summer camp -- or at least,  they know the first two verses. They don't realize what a kick-ass radical he was until we start to examine his life and his music. And the more I teach him, the more I realize how relevant his work is to the issues that consume us today.

Woody Guthrie in the 1940s

The lyrics of the song "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" were written by Guthrie in response to a plane crash in California on January 29, 1948. The passengers were Mexican agriculture workers who were being deported back to Mexico after picking fruit in the orchards of the Pacific Northwest. Of the 28 workers killed, only 12 were ever identified; they were all buried in a mass grave near Fresno. Guthrie's words were set to music in 1958 by Martin Hoffman. The version below, sung by Arlo Guthrie and Emmylou Harris, comes from a 1988 documentary called "A Vision Shared."

Another singer/songwriter whose work has special resonance today is Pete Seeger.  The selection below is the famous censored clip from "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" in 1968. The reason Seeger had only performed on TV once in 17 years, as Dick Smothers mentions, was because he'd been blacklisted. (The quality of the clip isn't very good; it seems to have been taped off a TV broadcast. Tommy Smothers has only now started to release the show onto DVD, starting with, for some reason, the third season.)  Seeger performs a medley of war songs from history, which seems to reinforce both Shaw and Faulkner. Seeger, by the way, is still going strong at 90, although he doesn't perform anymore.

Anita O'Day at the Film Forum

If you're within the sound of my voice (as New York disc jockeys used to say), hurry to the Cinema Village (12th Street between Fifth Avenue and University Place) to catch "Anita O'Day: The Life of a Jazz Singer."  O'Day was one of the all-time best, whether singing the melody (as when she swings Rodgers & Hart with Billy May's arrangements) or veering off to the farthest imaginable extent (as in her amazing rendition of "Tea for Two" at Mr. Kelly's restaurant in Chicago, April 1958). Born Anita Colton in Chicago in 1919 she named herself O'Day because it was "dough" in Pig Latin, and dough is what she wanted to make. She sang with big bands (Gene Krupa, Stan Kenton) in the 40s and did duets with trumpeter Roy Eldridge. She then reinvented herself as a solo artist recording on the Verve label. She electrified the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival with her treatment of "Sweet Georgia Brown." Her outfit on that sunny afternoon -- chic hat, white gloves, black dress -- was nearly as magnificent as her performance, and when her picture appeared in newsmagazines the public began to catch on to what other musicians knew all along. She was a self-made original: independent in a love-me-or-leave-me way, opinionated, candid. Her style was unique and she refused to compromise. O'Day used her voice as if it were an instrument; her bop scatting is the jazz equivalent of action painting. She lived high and went through dough more quickly than she could make it. Arrested for marijuana use in a frame-up, she figured she might as well try what she was accused of doing, and became, for the better part of two decades, a big-time heroin addict. It didn't hurt her singing. She managed to kick the habit and kept on ticking, unrepentantly, into her eighties. (Her obituary and Betty Comden's appeared on the same page of the New York Times one sad day late in 2006.) See the movie while you can. She'll show you half a dozen ways of approaching the Harold Arlen -- Ted Koehler standard, "Let's Fall in Love." And (in the words of a different song), when you fall you fall, and you might not mind it at all.

-- DL

Sinatra makes Obama's hit list -- and McCain's

Thanks to Blender magazine (and NPR), we now know our presidential candidates' top ten favorite songs.
The only recording artist to make both lists is Frank Sinatra. John McCain picked Sinatra's "I've Got You Under My Skin" (probably FS's finest uptempo song) as number 8 on his list; Barack Obama made the more unconventional choice, "Easy to Love," and put it seventh. Both songs were written by Cole Porter. Unusual choices: McCain picks two songs by ABBA; Obama, a known Rolling Stones fan, opts for "Gimme Shelter," a daring selection though no doubt safer under the circumstances than "You Can't Always Get What You Want" or "19th Nervous Breakdown. " Inadvertently funny pick: McCain votes for the great Jerome Kern standard "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" -- in the Platters' doo-wop version. McCain's list is the more predictable -- Neal Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," straight from the seventh-inning stretch. And I'd rather listen to any other song by Louis Armstrong, a hero of mine, than "What a Wonderful World."

--DL

"Mad Men" Loves the Blue Room (by Rodgers and Hart)

We'll have a blue room,
A new room,
For two room,
Where ev'ry day's a holiday
Because you're married to me.

Not like a ballroom,
A small room,
A hall room,
Where I can smoke my pipe away
With your wee head upon my knee.

We will thrive on,
Keep alive on,
Just nothing but kisses,
With Mister and Missus
On little blue chairs.

You sew your trousseau,
And Robinson Crusoe
Is not so far from worldly cares
As our blue room far away upstairs.

Unless my ears deceive me, that's Perry Como singing "Blue Room" (Rodgers and Hart), the song Betty says she liked so much in high school. Feeling romantic she gets Don to dance with her. Though there is some merit in Don's criticism of Como ("makes everything sound like Christmas"), the singer's rich baritone was never better than when he did such Rodgers and Hart songs as "Blue Room" and, in the late-1940s docupic with Mickey Rooney as Lorenz Hart, "Mountain Greenery."

The pertinence of the song in last night's episode is that it is, after "Tea for Two," perhaps the second greatest pop-lyric ode to married bliss: "where every day's a holiday because you're married to me." Perfect, for an hour in which everything connubial goes wrong: Don and Betty are interrupted by their kids in an all too rare amorous moment in bed; the couple argues and has a shoving match; the bed breaks; the stereo breaks; the little boy burns himself and has to be taken to the emergency room, the little girl accompanies dad to work and overhears. . . too much.

Poor Betty.

-- DL

"He Taught the Lindy to Arthur Murray": Richard Rand's Vaudeville Pop

Richard Rand, professor of engineering at Cornell University, offers these pages written by his late father, Al Rand, about his days in vaudeville.

An excerpt from "Autobiographical Notes" by Al Rand (1904-1996)

My partner and I learned tap dancing in the streets. We used to frequent dance halls in our teens, and became expert ballroom dancers at the ages of 15 and 16. At these dances we began to pick up the foundation of our knowledge.

The basic step in tap dancing is the time step. Learning this first step was to us like heroin to an addict. We just couldn't get enough of it. We sought out anyone that knew a little more than we did and begged them to teach it to us.

I remember standing on the sidewalk at 1 A.M. on a freezing 20 degree night outside of Laurel Gardens dance hall in East Harlem in 1919 and 1920, completely oblivious of the winds and the snow, practicing something new we may have learned that day.

After Jack and I had mastered enough of these steps to create a routine, we decided we were good enough to enter the amateur contests that were then prevalent in the local theaters. We never won any, but got enough experience to acquire a certain amount of stage presence. At one of these amateur shows we were seen by someone that needed a two-man tap dancing act for a "flash" they were putting together. That is how we ended up in Buffalo that fall of 1922.

Not knowing the processes of professional show business, my partner and I and the rest of the troupe were herded off the train that morning by the manager, who took us directly to the Shea Theater, where we rehearsed our dance numbers with the orchestra. Following this and not having been advised of anything more, we both decided to see what Buffalo looked like. You must remember that we were two East Side New York boys who had never been much further away from home than Coney Island or that one short summer on the farm.

We had no idea how long we had walked, but we were suddenly awakened by shouts coming from a passing taxi. "You stupid jerks! Where the hell have you been? Do you know that we go on in 15 minutes?"

We just couldn't understand what all the fuss was about. It wasn't until many performances later that we realized how much we must have worried them that morning; how "the show must go on" has always been such a strain on show people.

In that same first week I also learned to my consternation that you never whistle in a dressing room. The uproar I caused by doing so was frightening, but after being told to turn around three times in one spot and then walk right out of the room, I was forgiven. Fortunately the shows went smoothly that day or I most certainly would have been blamed.

On the strength of our good impression on that Buffalo date, our act was booked for a tour of the Delmar Time about 10 weeks through the Southeast.

Music and Poems, Part 5 [by Lloyd Schwartz]

(The bittersweet conclusion of the story of my poems being set to music by the composition fellows at Tanglewood)

July 30, 2008: Grand Finale

Last night’s concert was a memorable event. Nearly 300 people—friends and Tanglewood Music Center people, musicians and people curious about the future of contemporary music—crowded into Tanglewood’s old barn of a Chamber Music Hall and spilled over onto the lawn to hear the results of this summer’s Vocal Composition Project, the first time the Tanglewood Music Center’s young fellowship composers ever got to work closely and systematically with a living poet.

I’d returned to Tanglewood the day before for the dress rehearsal, only a few days after the conclusion of the overwhelming, astonishing five-day/14-event Elliott Carter centennial celebration, at which the 99-year-old composer was present at several world premieres and in which almost all the Tanglewood fellows participated. Carter was certainly an inspiration, and a challenge, to the composition fellows. He’s one of the great setters of American and modern poetry. The festival offered memorable performances of his profound and quirky settings of Elizabeth Bishop, Quasimodo, Ungaretti, Montale, John Ashbery (who, a mere 81, was present for the premiere of Carter’s hilarious and luminous new a cappella sextet, Mad Regales, a pun—Carter loves literary puns—on “madrigals”), and, most moving of all, a recent cycle of Wallace Stevens poems, the autumnal In the Distances of Sleep, sung by the remarkable young Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey (who the week before had made another huge impression in John Harbison’s Symphony No. 5, which includes poems by Czeslaw Milosz, Louise Glück, who was also present, and Rilke). At one of the panel discussion, British conductor/composer and Carter advocate Oliver Knussen talk about how Carter’s poem settings always began with the vocal line, filling in the accompaniment later

Was this how the composition fellows were going to approach my poems?

At the rehearsal, participants and onlookers alike were breathing a sigh of relief that they had survived the exhausting Carter week.

Sinatra & Elvis on TV

"Love Me Tender" versus "Witchcraft"